At left, cops raid Kenneth Marsh's Gryphon Holdings office in Travis on April 21, 2010. Marsh, right, received eight years in prison in a boiler-room scheme.

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Prince’s Bay resident Kenneth Marsh bilked nearly $20 million from more than 5,400 investors in the U.S. and internationally.

Some clients lost their life savings with Marsh’s company, Gryphon Holdings. Two even contemplated suicide, court papers said.

Now, it’s Marsh’s turn to suffer.

A federal judge today sentenced him to eight years behind bars and ordered him to pay more than $10 million in restitution, said prosecutors.

Posing as a high-flying executive, Marsh masterminded a "devastating fraud" scheme out of a Travis strip mall that convinced financial advisers, insurance salesmen, retired doctors and educators and other seemingly canny professionals to put their hard-earned money in his bogus hedge fund, Brooklyn federal prosecutors said.

One client, Dr. Rachpal Kukreja, a 72-year-old Kentucky ophthalmologist, lost more than $700,000, said court papers.

Dr. Kukreja, who had "substantial" health problems, was hoping to grow his $1.1 million life savings to provide for the care of his permanently disabled son, after his own death, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Roger Burlingame and Patrick Sean Sinclair wrote to the court.

Another customer,a 54-year-old North Carolina insurance salesman considered suicide as a means for his wife to collect on his life insurance policy after suffering extensive losses investing with Gryphon, court papers said.

Those documents did not cite the specific experiences of any Staten Island victims.

The sentencing was imposed a week after Marsh’s lawyer requested an adjournment when Senior District Judge Jack B. Weinstein said he planned to sentence Marsh to 10 years in prison. That was twice the five-year term Weinstein had indicated, at a proceeding last month, he was going to levy.

The judge said last week he changed his mind after speaking to a number of the victims.

Marsh’s lawyer, Alan S. Futerfas, objected to an increased sentence. In court papers filed Friday, he said his client had pleaded guilty with the understanding he’d receive five years.

Futerfas also said there were several mitigating factors. He cited Marsh’s "very turbulent" childhood and battles with mental illness and substance abuse, to include the period when the scam occurred.

Launched in 2006, the "boiler-room" scheme ran through April 2010 and cheated victims, many of them retirees, of more than $20 million in fees and investment services, prosecutors said.

Gryphon, they said, presented itself as a high-powered hedge fund run by rock-star executives who brought in more money than Warren Buffett, and claimed to have offices on Wall Street, and in Chicago, London and Sydney. The company also did business as Gryphon Financial.

In actuality, Marsh operated Gryphon out of a strip mall on Victory Boulevard next to a bakery and paid to use a "virtual address" on Wall Street, authorities said.

Using aliases, Marsh boasted he owned private planes and yachts, and took a different fashion model out to lunch each day, said court papers. Prosecutors said Marsh had been barred in 2007 from working in the securities industry.

Marsh trained a crew to help pull off the scheme, "charismatically appealing to their sense of greed with alarming disregard for the grief and loss that they, collectively, caused," prosecutors said in court papers. They claimed Gryphon held a $1.4 billion hedge fund.

The cadre contacted its victims through unsolicited e-mails and phone numbers and promoted itself through a series of Web pages and electronic newsletters.

They employed high-pressure tactics to convince clients to invest and re-invest even as those clients sustained heavy losses.

According to court papers, two customers contemplated suicide after losing their life savings investing with Gryphon.

Seventeen co-defendants charged in connection with the scheme, including Marsh’s ex-wife, Nicole Marsh, 32, have pleaded guilty and were sentenced to various jail terms ranging from three to 25 months, said a spokesman for Loretta E. Lynch, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. One conspirator is an alleged Gambino crime family associate.

The sentencing doesn’t conclude Marsh’s legal woes.

Still pending is a civil lawsuit suit filed last year in Brooklyn federal court by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission against Marsh, Gryphon Holdings and several other defendants.

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Editor's note: Information on Marsh's restitution payment was incomplete on earlier versions of this story posted on silive.com.